Brooks Lybrand

00:00 Hello, everybody. I'm Kent C. Dodds, and I'm joined by my friend Brooks Lybrand. Am I saying your last name right? I don't know if I've ever said it. No, you got it. That's that's right. Most people say Lybrand. It is Lybrand. So thanks, Lybrand. Okay, awesome. So Brooks and I met years

00:15 ago as part of the Remix community. And Brooks actually spoke at that was year one of RemixConf, right? Or was it year two? 23. Yeah. 23. Yeah. Okay. So talk 22. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00:30 And Brooks has just been a really important part of the Remix community since the very beginning. And now is working as the developer relations manager of the Remix team over at Shopify. Pretty much took took my spot. So I took off from Shopify and then Brooks came in and

00:48 and filled in and expanded the role. And you've just been doing a phenomenal job. Super happy with that. And it's been a pleasure to know you. And I'm so excited that you accepted the invitation to come out and speak at Epic Web Conf in March. So with all of that out of

01:04 the way, Brooks, could you give us an intro to yourself? Thanks, Kent. Yeah. So yeah, my name is Brooks. I've been on the Remix team for a little over a year now. Before that, I worked at like a grocery store in Texas called H-E-B. As a developer, I think. As a developer. Yeah. Yeah. I never actually got to be a bad boy. I had some friends who definitely worked there

01:25 when they were in high school and whatnot. But yeah, it was it was really good just working at a company that you're delivering a website that serves millions of people every single day. It's maybe not the like, you know, the coolest, sleekest kind of job, but you actually get to interact with real users. And the main priority is like actually letting people

01:44 get their groceries, buy their food that they need to eat and live. So that really gave me a good solid foundation of just what users expect and need. So I was always very much a Remix enthusiast because I felt it solved problems that I had. And it helped me think about the web in a

02:00 way that I didn't feel like the paradigm I didn't feel like I had before to think in terms of web standards and to think from how should things just work before JavaScript is there? And then how do we enhance that experience? And so that's why I love Remix. And then, yeah, I got an opportunity, like you said, to talk at RemixConf 2023 about building community and running a meetup

02:19 that I run in Austin. And so one thing led to another. Now I could actually do this for a full time job, which is awesome. Yeah. And you're doing a terrific job, I have to say, like you run the week or let's see, is it bi-weekly or monthly roadmap planning meetings?

02:36 Or maybe it's monthly so far. Yeah. They've switched cadences a few times. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So those have been awesome. The management of the Discord and the meetups and the newsletter and all of that. And then, of course, the docs probably takes a lot of your

02:52 time and the GitHub issues and everything too. Like it's a lot. And to be a maintainer of an open source project and community is a huge task. And I'm really grateful that Shopify saw the value in that and is paying the bills. When I was there at Remix, we were just like,

03:12 I sure hope we don't have to worry about paying bills once this VC money runs out. So Shopify is just, I don't know for you because I left right about that time, but it seems on the outside that Shopify has been a really good steward of the project.

03:29 Yeah. It's been super cool. I really didn't have a ton of, I knew who Shopify was roughly. I'd never actually tried to build my own store or anything. So I didn't have a ton of context going in of what to expect or anything. But yeah, they've been super awesome. It's a very high

03:44 amount of trust, I think, that they give teams. And so our team is really, they've very much trusted us. They interact with us. There's things built on top of React Router and Remix, both just websites, like the admin, Shopify admin is built on React Router,

04:01 as well as Hydrogen, which is their own open source way to build a Shopify store. So there's definitely dependencies and ways that we naturally interact with them because they're dog feeding on top of our stuff. But then there's also just the aspect of, yeah, we get resources from Shopify, not just in payment, but also just in some infrastructure

04:20 and just them taking care of those things. But then we're also providing a lot of value to them just by building core tech and that core tech that everyone gets to use through open source library. So it's been really cool so far. Yeah, I was definitely honestly going into it. I was a little bit like, I don't know what this is going to be. I don't know if Shopify is going to change,

04:39 pull the rug out from under them. But I was so pleasantly surprised. Yeah, it's been so easy, and they've been really, really high trust. And yeah, hopefully we're delivering. That's why it's high trust. I think that's the case. That's how I like to think of it. But yeah,

04:52 they've been super cool. Yeah, I'm thrilled about that. And with the recent release of React Router V7 and the merge of the Remix brand and React Router, and now React 19 is out. It's very, very exciting. Your talk is titled, What React 19 Means for React Router. And before I ask you

05:11 about some of the specifics or to expand on that, a lot of people who are familiar with the Remix brand and React Router are going to ask the question, what is going on with the Remix brand? I'm not going to ask you to explain that. I'm just going to tell people that they need to come to the conference and talk with you about it. How's that? Yeah, I think that's a great idea.

05:31 And then you'll come talk to me and I'll say, Hey, here's Ryan Florence, go talk to him. So it'd be great. We'll just keep stringing along. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, definitely. Please, please come to the conference. Love to talk about all those things. I imagine and hope that we have even more updates and more solid updates leading up to that and around that time. So

05:47 I'm excited. I understand that. Yeah, there's people just always want to know what's coming and we always want to know what the next new thing is. And yeah, definitely threw people for a loop giving up our branding, but we gave it up for millions of apps and we still do have plans with Remix. We're definitely doing big things with it. But the goal was we saw a big gap for users of

06:06 React Router to get to React 19. And we just saw that it was a huge gap and we had a really good opportunity to help those people instead of just saying like, Oh, come over to Remix and all your problems will be fixed. Instead, we could meet developers where they're at and say, Hey, we're going to try and make React Router better. We're going to make it really easy for you to opt into

06:22 all these, all these newer features, RSC, you know, server-side rendering, all that kind of good stuff just through React Router. So I don't know. It just felt like an opportunity. We couldn't really give up just for the sake of some brand. Yeah. Yeah. I think you did the absolutely the right thing and people can come and ask what is happening to the Remix brand in the future

06:42 at the conference. So with that, you talked about the bridge that React Router is for React 19. Can you expand a little bit on what it is you're going to be talking about? Yeah, it's a great question. I'm going to, I'm going to give it away a little bit that this is a little bit pressure conference driven development. I really need to learn a lot about

07:02 React 19. I definitely know a lot of things, but I want to actually dive into it myself. But there are a lot of things I'm excited about. I think one thing, like the obvious thing, most people seem to be excited about is React server components. And I definitely want to hit on those, but I also know there's going to be so many other people probably do. There's already been like a million talks. I really don't want to give, you know, the N plus one talk on what React server components are and

07:21 like how your paradigm, like Kent's already done that like multiple times and it's been really great. So I definitely, I will talk about that, but there's just so many other little features that I feel like get missed or maybe overlooked that I'm super excited to talk about. Just things that like Remix had to do itself and have just gotten so much easier, such as like meta tags and

07:38 links and the way that you can inject your style sheets and whatnot have just gotten so much easier. And so my favorite kind of talks are the talks where you're shown a bunch of complex code. And then in the next slide, all the code melts away with this new magical API. And that's like very much what React 19 to me is for a lot of things and just makes building your app so much

07:58 simpler. It allows you to do these paradigms that Remix had to create, you know, kind of, yeah, paradigms and APIs and stuff for, and a lot of that stuff melts away. And then on top of it, there's all these nice new goodies, such as like web component support, which is super cool. And RSC, which is this totally new paradigm. So I'm excited to show both the cookies and just like

08:16 the nice little cleanup that you get with React 19. Yeah. Yeah. I think integrating more tightly with React is a really, really good thing. Because one of the things I really like about

08:28 what React 19 has done by adopting features from frameworks like Remix is now the code that I'm writing, the React code I'm writing doesn't really look like a particular framework beyond React. And so I can transfer that knowledge to any framework that I'm using, any higher level

08:47 framework like Remix or React Router. And that transfer of knowledge is really valuable for the community. Yep. I agree. I mean, that was the big sell of like React, I think for a lot of people, and especially with things like React Native and all that stuff was to have that. So yeah, it was tough. Like when all the frameworks kind of started becoming a thing and you had the whole

09:07 frameworks world and everything, it was frustrating to see like, ah, I don't like that there's like a next way to do this and a Remix way to do this. If it all is React, I'd like it more often not to be pretty similar. There's obviously going to be differences based on like hosting providers and stuff. But again, if we're taking like web fundamentals and those APIs as the core principle

09:27 for so much of the stuff, that's how Remix works, then it should be portable in so many ways. I think we were losing that a bit in like the React paradigm. There were flavors of React, and that's not ideal. So yeah, I completely agree with you. I'm glad there's a bit of a convergence in a sense that, yeah, it makes it easy to keep putting stuff around. But it's hard

09:45 to get those primitives right. So I get that it took a bit of time to get to some consensus, but I'm really happy with where things are going. And yeah, hopefully we'll be able to show why that's valuable. Yeah, super. Well, I'm thrilled about that. I wanted to ask you also, so you gave

10:02 a talk about community building at RemixConf in 23. You definitely attend conferences and give presentations and you spend a lot of time doing this kind of thing. And I'm curious from your

10:17 perspective as a meetup organizer and a attendee to various conferences and speaker at many conferences, what is the reason that you decide you want to do this sort of thing in person? Because we can kind of simulate that remotely, right? We can record a video and upload it,

10:36 and we can do various online things. What is it about in person that is worth the effort? Yeah, that's a really great question. I probably have too many answers to that question, so I'm trying to distill it to a couple of things. Because beginning, honestly, early on,

10:54 it was very self-motivated. I wanted the opportunity to speak. I wanted to basically make myself a little bit more just known in the general ecosystem so I could meet people, get connections to Kent and to Ryan and to Michael that I wouldn't have got before, and just those opportunities. But more and more recently, it's very much shifted as I've

11:14 grown as a developer and definitely a little bit more senior than I was when I started. It's much more to actually hear how other people are solving problems, hear what other people's real-world problems are. You certainly get that online, but no offense to all the popular sites

11:29 like the Orange site and whatnot. There definitely is a large noise-to-signal ratio. And so when you actually talk to real users, a lot of the things that on the internet you're told that you're supposed to care about with your framework, whatever, are very much in the back burner. When you actually talk to someone, they're like, hey, I'm just trying to use this

11:48 library, and it's really hard to install it because for some reason I get this bug every single time. You get those things where you're like, hey, I think it's cool that you're maybe taking on this different data-loading paradigm, but it honestly makes this pattern that we've had for a really long time really hard. How should I be thinking about that?

12:05 So I love it both just from a user research standpoint, just from growing my own knowledge of like, oh, what are the problems out there? What would it look like to be at another company if and when I'm done with this specific one? So I just love that it's just more real. I mean, no offense to the internet. The internet is great, but there's a bit of a fakeness to it.

12:23 You don't really get that fakeness at a conference, and especially not at a meetup, because that's straight up your neighbors that you're talking to there. Yeah, I completely agree. I appreciate that. Now, when we're at the conference and meeting with those real people, what are the topics that people can come up and talk with you about that

12:42 really get you excited and talking? Let's say there's a developer who sees you across the hall and they're like, oh, I want to go talk to Brooks. What's something that you would like them to come talk with you about? Yeah, I mean, I think the obvious and easy one is definitely going to be React Router and Remix and all that good stuff. So I think that's the super easy one. Feel free

13:01 to ask me questions or throw out ideas or whatever. So I love that stuff. But some other things that I really care about, my background is a little bit more in math and economics and data visualization. So if that's like a niche that you care about, that's something I never get to talk about or

13:18 think about. So I love talking about that kind of stuff and that very data heavy stuff. But yeah, really all that programming stuff is great in general. But yeah, especially our love and joy of React Router and Remix that we're trying to work on tirelessly. If you like it, we'd love to hear that. If you don't like it and have feedback that is actionable, I really want to hear that as

13:37 well. I love that. Yeah. I didn't realize that you had a background in economics. I bet you and Ryan have interesting conversations occasionally too about that stuff. Occasionally. He forgot. I told him a long time ago and then I brought it up and he's like, you never told me that. So I don't know.

13:52 He apparently didn't even remember. I think Ryan sometimes has a selective memory. So hopefully if he hears that, he selects to not remember that I said that. Yeah, hopefully. Hey, thanks, Brooke, so much for giving us some of your time to talk about your talk and the things that you're looking forward to about the conference. I'm really looking forward to seeing

14:16 you again in Utah in March, just over two months away from the time we're recording this. It's going to be a lot of fun to see you. Thanks, Ken. Thanks so much for inviting me. I appreciate it. Yeah. Bye, everybody.